Verbal Circus
The Writers Festival has hit Melbourne, 10 days of quality gas-bagging and flyleaf signing. I managed to catch Desmond O’Grady, a profiler nonpareil when it comes to literary names of the twenties.
What other journo has hunted down Tennessee Williams, Jorge Luis Borges, Rebecca West and Polish Nobelist Czeslaw Milosz? Not to mention all but earning a restraining order form Graham Greene while on the Greek islands.
The only snag with O’Grady was a cast-iron reliance on his own script, telling war stories from his heyday as though to speak form memory was a type of treachery.
Among the session’s revelations, however, hearing the lowdown on the period’s lions, was the fact that Borges the Argentine visionary, the zookeeper of chimera and hippogriffs, was not totally blind.
“He could discern outlines,” recalled O’Grady, looking up from his memoirs. Obviously enough for the godfather of magic realism to fill in the gaps.
Should you be reading this post – from Melbourne – in good time – I’ll be playing Professor Anagram at the Shallow End with Jane Clifton on Thursday night (August 30). Come on down and learn who’s the only living oxymoron I’ve ever met.
The next day, the last Friday in August, I’ll be chairing a plumb forum with Lonely Planet founder Tony Wheeler, and wicked nomad Brian Thacker, author of such memorable travelogues as The Naked Man Festival, I’m Not Eating That Muck and Rule No5 – No Sex On The Bus. The session is called Badlands, but the yarns are guaranteed to be good.